accounting, expense tracking, tax loss harvesting, liquid investment rebalancing, taxes
Can you elaborate on what tools you use for these things?
Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?
41–50 of 749 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?
#42The most useful thing I have is a little script that logs into my bank, downloads a CSV and sends me the latest transaction via email daily. Saves me time to login to online banking, and also serves as a useful way to search for previous transactions inside my mailbox from time to time. Besides that I use Home Assistant[0] with a few simple automations. For example, when the lights are on in the bathroom, and it's af…
> a little script that logs into my bank
I've wanted to do something like this for so long but it just seems so painful. How do you do this with just a little script when there's so much Javascript involved in the page, as well as random interjections like random extra security verification steps? Do you have a particularly scrape-friendly bank?
Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?
#43The most useful thing I have is a little script that logs into my bank, downloads a CSV and sends me the latest transaction via email daily. Saves me time to login to online banking, and also serves as a useful way to search for previous transactions inside my mailbox from time to time. Besides that I use Home Assistant[0] with a few simple automations. For example, when the lights are on in the bathroom, and it's af…
For your banking script, are you able to use an API with a limited access token? Or does it use your normal credentials. I don't save my various banking credentials anywhere, not even 1password, as they're so sensitive, curious how you do this.
Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?
#44Parsing my monthly credit card bill (PDF), categorizing, and displaying statistics.
Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?
#45The lights in the most reasonably trafficked areas of my apartment are automated. The kitchen and bathroom mainly.
If I'm in the kitchen I'm actively cooking or using the sink and pacing around, so the motion sensor keeps the lights on. After 1 minute of no motion, they turn off. Important to set timers though as the lights are no longer a reminder if something is in the oven or on the stovetop.
For the bathroom, I have a sensor placed precisely to view both inside and out of the shower with the curtain closed. This means the lights won't turn off while someone is in the shower unless they stand really still for 2 minutes. If someone wants to take a bath and won't move much, I can override the sensor to a longer shutoff time.
At 6:30pm I have a light that turns on to simulate that we're home. Looking to move this to a "sunset minus 30 minutes" model soon so it appears more organic.
At 2am, all of the lights turn off in case we forgot, or as a friendly reminder to go to bed. It hasn't worked today. :)
Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?
#46Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?
#47I used DSP to recognize the commercials in the radio broadcast on my stereo receiver and turn down the volume automatically ("adblock for the radio broadcast"). I described it here: http://blog.rekawek.eu/2016/02/24/radio-adblock/
im getting an error
Sorry, I had some DNS issues. It should be fine now.
Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?
#48Parsing my monthly credit card bill (PDF), categorizing, and displaying statistics.
Ooh, I've been looking for something like this. Could I ask how you parse your bills? Did you just hack together your own script or did you find a parser online? I tried doing this several times but it seems rather painful to get right since the formats can differ and since copying text from PDFs can sometimes ignore the table layouts and whatnot.
Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?
#49I use https://www.home-assistant.io/ to do a coupple of automations like switching everything which uses power off when I leave home to preserve energy and switching a CCTV cam on at the same time for safety reasons.
But one of the more usefull automations is a text2speach script which fires in the morning between 6 and 11, during workdays, when I'm not asleep but still at home, always 7 minutes before the next train to work leaves. This way I miss the train faar less often.
Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?
#50I built an accelerometer-based washing machine sensor which sends a notification to my phone when the washing is done. This is useful because the machine itself has no indication when it's done: http://www.instructables.com/id/Washing-Machine-Notification...
I did a similar thing, via an esp8266 device and a vibration sensor!
I also automated the display of tram-departures from the tram-stop next to my house with similar hardware.
Otherwise I setup some "wireless buttons" to trigger alerts/actions on my Linux desktop system, and record local temperature/humidity into a time-series database for tracking purposes.